Weave Net 1.5 will be released next week and includes a Container Network Interface (CNI) plug-in for Kubernetes 1.2 and other software that uses the CNI API. This means you can now use Weave Net as a native networking option for Kubernetes, and it offers users some capabilities they didn’t have before:

Simplicity: Kubernetes 1.2 users can use Weave Net as a native networking plug-in, making integration simpler.

Production-ready: Weave Net 1.5 is the first Kubernetes CNI plugin that doesn’t depend on a central database of network data. This makes Kubernetes with Weave Net simpler to set up, maintain and operate.

Multicast support: Weave Net’s container SDN emulates a full layer 2 network, including multicast. This is important for many financial services applications and middleware that distribute market data and other feeds using multicast. A good example of Weave Net usage for this is the International Securities Exchange (ISE) “Anywhere Exchange” that multicasts market data over a Weave network to all of the active instances of the exchange. More on that here: https://www.ise.com/technology/disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud/

Because Weave Net provides a “Micro SDN” for Kubernetes clusters, applications are 100 percent network portable across development, test and production environments running on laptops, data-centers and public clouds. That’s the use case for Kiva.org and VP of Engineering David Pollack. And because Weave Net has no central database, it is easy to use for hybrid cloud container deployments where applications span private datacenters and public clouds.

There are also a number of other improvements and optimizations in Net 1.5, including faster and better recovery from reboots of Docker and/or the Docker host, making Weave Net even more resilient in production.